Unbitten (37 page)

But how to bring it up again? They had just met. It’s
not like stumbling on some chick in the alleyway and having
a suck and a moan.

He knelt beside her and pushed the green streak behind one
ear.

“Roxanne?” he said softly. “I know you
need to sleep, but I wondered if…”

He was too shy to say the words.

Roxanne opened one eye, hoping. “If?” she said.

“…if you just need sleep, or if…”

“
If
fucking
what
, Pierre, just spit
it the fuck out!”

Pierre walked over to a corner of the loft where he kept
his few things–a small pile of clothes, washed and
folded by the farm wife, a few tools in a cardboard box. He
took out a hunting knife that he had been given about
ninety years ago, by a human friend long dead now.

He came back over and knelt again next to Roxanne. They
looked into each other’s eyes.

“I want to do this for you,” he said, shrugging
off his coat and unbuttoning his shirt. He took the tip of
the knife and drew it across his chest, across his heart.
His blood sprang to the surface, first in drops, and then
gathering together, it began to drip down his muscular
chest.

“Drink,” said Pierre, opening his arms to
Roxanne, who looked up at him with an expression of such
gratitude that Pierre felt tears prickle behind his eyes.

Quickly she scooched next to him and put her tongue on his
chest, first licking the drips, and then she pressed her
lips to the deepest part of the cut and began to
suck–long, deep sucks, occasionally grunting with
satisfaction.

Pierre had never felt anything like it before. So this is
bliss, he thought, leaning his head back on the hay bale,
seeing the stars through the opening in the side of the
barn, his arms around Roxanne, his brain and his body
suffused with euphoric warmth. It was nighttime, but after
Roxanne had finished sucking, the two vampires who had just
met curled up together in the hay like a pair of puppies,
and slept soundly all the way past dawn.

Henri had spent the night working very hard in the lab. He
was starting to make some progress on the formula for
labri
Hemo-Yum, having, he believed, made it past
the first stumbling block in the project.

One thing he was grateful for was that at least off the top
of his head, he guessed that
labrim
were not going
to require the insanely large number of flavors that male
vampires did. Males not only wanted variety, they
constantly wanted something new, and so any manufacturer of
synthetic blood was going to have to continually bring out
new flavors, even when the natural differences among human
women had long been exhausted.

Labrim
seemed to have more sensible, practical
tastes. He wondered, is it the same for human women? What
were
they
looking for?

And with that, all work stopped and he sat at his desk,
leaning back in his chair, thinking about Jo. About how
soft and warm her lips felt when he first kissed her. How
he could feel her increasing excitement as they held each
other. And how she had looked on Drogo, and how deeply
attracted to her he was then, when she was on horseback
leaping over those ridiculously high fences, fearless and
intent.

Sometimes, he thought, even scientists will agree that what
seems to be the most reasonable course turns out to be a
mistake. So she’s a human. Even if we only had sixty
or so years together, that would be a whole lot better than
nothing, yes?

And it is possible, is it not, that she might someday
consider drinking from me? Might consider, of her own free
will, turning herself, so that she could extend her
lifespan by hundreds of years? The life of a vampire it
does have its benefits, he thought, fiddling with a pencil,
and running his tongue along his extremely sharp teeth.

A bang on the door. Henri now knew perfectly well who and
what. David, fresh from biting another drunken male guest,
wanting to talk his ear off.

He pushed a button, the door slid open, and David staggered
inside.

“My very dearest brother, the Marquis!” he
said, and bowed.

“You’re drunk, said Henri. “Again.”

“I know!” said David gleefully.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” He raised his arms
up over his head like a ballet dancer and did a creditable
pirouette. “The thing is, Henri, that–”
he stopped pirouetting and collapsed in his favorite
armchair, where he spun around with his head towards the
floor and his feet in the air, as he usually did.
“The thing is, it’s
better
this way.
Not drunk is bad. Drunk is good. That’s about all you
need to know,” and he laughed, pointing and flexing
his feet and going into an upside-down second position.

Henri was half-tuning his brother out. He had been showing
up in this condition almost every night and Henri no longer
reacted as though it were a crisis. It felt annoying rather
than frightening. Very, very annoying.

“I’m going to call Angélique,” he
said, almost to himself. Half of his mind had already
returned to his work, going over the latest data from the
lab.

“I’m not saying I was
in love
with her
or anything,” David was saying. “But I wish she
hadn’t told me not to come to her room
anymore.”

The interesting thing was at the third stage of the
process, Henri was thinking. That’s where the process
for
labrim
must take a different path than that
for males. He made a note to call Claudine–

–what was David saying? Who was he talking about?

Henri walked around his desk and stopped in front of David.
“Sit up,” he commanded his brother.

“No, thank you,” said David. He was absorbed in
letting his long hair fall to the floor and combing it
through slowly with his fingertips. “My hair is
standing upside down,” he said, giggling.

“I told you to
sit up
!” said Henri,
and there was no way not to obey, drunk or not.

David let his legs fold over his head and then he fell to
his side and got up. “What’s the matter?”
he said to Henri.

“Who are you talking about? Who wouldn’t let
you into her room anymore?”

“Jo,” said David.

“What were you doing in Jo’s room?”

“Fucking her,” said David simply.

Henri felt suddenly cold, and then a surge of rage filled
him and he turned on his brother. “You’ve been
what
?” he snarled.

David had no idea why his brother was so angry.
“Well, you said to stay away from the guests,”
he said, defensively.

“You haven’t done that either!” shouted
Henri. “How long has this been going on? Why did she
tell you not to go to her room anymore? Why wasn’t I
informed?”

The brothers both put their hands over their ears because
of the shouting.

“Henri, dearest of dear brothers, since when have you
been interested in who I was sleeping with? Since when?
You’re always in your lab, always toiling away for
the good of vampire-kind, while I do my job, which is
frittering the centuries away enjoying myself.” He
grinned.

Henri wanted more than anything to shove David to the floor
and force him to tell every detail of what had gone on
between him and Jo. He felt like his vampire heart was
breaking, just thinking about his brother with her. She had
sex
with him? With
David
? Had he
completely misunderstood who she was and what she was
about? Was he himself nothing more than fun and games, a
foreigner to toy with before going back home to the States
with a few new trophies?

Had his brother hurt her?

He pulled David up to standing, and grabbed him by the
collar. “Do not bother her again,” he said, his
voice hard and tight and razor-sharp. For the second time
that night, it was clear that disobedience was not an
option.

Marianne had walked around the Château grounds with
Jo, holding hands with her, talking in the feverish way
that best friends with a lot of ground to cover talked. Jo
had described her nights with David, and detailed
especially the night he had bitten her. Marianne listened
with her mouth slightly open, fascinated.

“I’ll be honest, Jo, when you first told me, I
wondered whether you’d been eating funny mushrooms or
something,” said Marianne. “But then I got
online, and found…this whole world, this whole
new…people want to hope it’s not real but
it is
. I mean, holy crap–
vampires!
”

“Yeah,” said Jo. “Although you get your
head around it pretty quickly when you see your blood
dripping down a guy’s lip.”

“And the other thing is,” said Marianne,
“it’s not only vampires. I found stuff online
that makes me think there are other beings, not humans or
vampires either–witches, for example, are apparently
not just a Halloween dress-up option.”

“Hmm,” said Jo, thinking about her day in the
forest, and the woman chewing a stick, and the strange
bird-like sounds they had made.

Marianne continued, “It’s no wonder they went
into serious hiding, when you think about it. Nothing like
a full force effort to burn all of your kind out of
existence to make secrecy of paramount importance.”

Jo looked fondly at Marianne. There was nothing her friend
liked better than finding some new subject to research and
burrow into, and this one was a doozy.

“I have to admit,” confided Marianne,
“that I can’t wait to meet David.” They
walked farther down the gravel path, circling around to the
stables. “And I had to–look–” She
reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a silver
cross.

Jo laughed. “You worry too much, Marianne!” she
said. “It’s not like David is out on the prowl
every night, waiting to pounce on anyone who passes by.
Yes, it’s true, he did bite me without asking, but
there was some context, you know. We’d been sort of
seeing each other. And he didn’t really hurt
me.”

Marianne cocked her head. “Excuse me for pointing
this out if it sounds too blunt,” she said,
“but you are not, um, you are a person
who…”

“Oh, Marianne, just out with it!”

They laughed. “All right then. Your judgment in
relationships is not sound. All right, it’s terrible.
I know you still seem to believe David is a decent guy, as
far as parasitic bloodsuckers go–” she
interrupted herself with another laugh–“but I
don’t know that he is, actually. You tend to be
fearless when perhaps some fear is called for.”

She swung her arm around her friend and gave her a squeeze.
“You
minimize
,” she said.

“Well, fine,” said Jo, almost huffy, but not
quite. “Anyway, I’m not trying to defend David.
That’s over. O-V-E-R.”

“I’m glad,” said Marianne. "I’m
carrying the cross because I figured, hey, this is new
territory for me. I have no experience, that I know of,
with being around vampires. So why not take simple
precautions when it’s easy enough to do.

“This was my crazy great-aunt Gertrude’s cross.
She was found dead in her basement clutching it.”

“It doesn’t sound like it did much for
great-aunt Gertrude,” said Jo.

Marianne pursed her lips and said nothing.

“I want you to meet Henri next,” said Jo,
trying to keep her voice level and nonchalant.

“Quit it,” said Marianne.

“Quit what?”

“Quit trying to sound so offhand. I can tell
you’re totally infatuated with him.”

Jo grinned and took off down the gravel path, running hard
and fast, and then spun around and ran back to Marianne.

“You have more energy than is right for one
person,” Marianne sighed. “I really need a nap.
Can we go to my cottage for a little while, and let me
recharge?”

“
Not
infatuated,” said Jo.
“That’s the whole thing I’m trying to
tell you. We’ve gotten to be friends. I’ve only
kissed him a few times. It’s different, I’m
telling you.
He’s
different.”